to all these enemies (though the climate proved wonderfully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away and all but disappeared.  Somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century a single sloop watched its season and slipped out by night, bearing within it all that was left of the great British colony, a few men, a few women, and perhaps a dozen dusky children.  English history then denies all knowledge of the place.  Owing to one cause and another civilisation shifted its centre to a spot some four or five hundred miles to the south, and to-day Santa Marina is not much larger than it was three hundred years ago.  In population it is a happy compromise, for Portuguese fathers wed Indian mothers, and their children intermarry with the Spanish.  Although they get their ploughs from Manchester, they make their coats from their own sheep, their silk from their own worms, and their furniture from their own cedar trees, so that in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in Elizabethan days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea to found a small colony within the last ten years are not so easily described, and will never perhaps be recorded in history books.  Granted facility of travel, peace, good trade, and so on, there was besides a kind of dissatisfaction among the English with the older countries and the enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass, and rich brown painting which they offered to the tourist.  The movement in search of something new was of course infinitely small, affecting only a handful of well-to-do people.  It began by a few schoolmasters serving their passage out to South America as the pursers of tramp steamers.  They returned in time for the summer term, when their stories of the splendours and hardships of life at sea, the humours of sea-captains, the wonders of night and dawn, and the marvels of the place delighted outsiders, and sometimes found their way into print.  The country itself taxed all their powers of description, for they said it was much bigger than Italy, and really nobler than Greece.  Again, they declared that the natives were strangely beautiful, very big in stature, dark, passionate, and quick to seize the knife.  The place seemed new and full of new forms of beauty, in proof of which they showed handkerchiefs which the women had worn round their heads, and primitive carvings coloured bright greens and blues.  Somehow or other, as fashions do, the fashion spread; an old monastery was quickly turned into a hotel, while a famous line of steamships altered its route for the convenience of passengers.